Leaving Art

Since the 1970s, the performance and conceptual artist Suzanne Lacy has explored women's experiences, violence, race, ethnicity, aging, and economic disparities through her pioneering work. Combining aesthetics and politics, and often collaborating with other artists and community organizations, she has staged large-scale public art projects, sometimes involving hundreds of participants. She has consistently written about her work: planning, describing, and analyzing it; advocating socially engaged art practices; theorizing the relationship between art and social intervention; and questioning the boundaries separating high art from popular participation. Leaving Art brings together thirty pieces that Lacy has written since 1974. In different ways, each one relates to questions arising during performances and installations, although five were written as scripts or artworks. The chronological arrangement of the pieces reveals Lacy's intense focus on questions of gender, violence, and the body during the 1970s, and her turn in the 1980s toward political performance art and questions about how the media could be used by artists to instigate social change. Lacy later engaged questions of race relations, criminal justice, and education in the 1990s, developing community art initiatives designed to spark substantive discussion about charged social and political issues. More recently, in her reflections on what art is and should be now, she has compared socially engaged public art with Buddhist practices, and examined the influence of one of her mentors, the late Allan Kaprow, on the development of feminist performance art in the 1970s. Leaving Art includes an introduction to Lacy's art and writing by Moira Roth, and an afterword in which Kerstin Mey situates Lacy's work in relation to contemporary cultural theory and practice.